What if Augmented Reality is Audio?

↑ Meet Detour, a location-aware audio guide.

What if we’ve been all wrong about Augmented Reality? What if it isn’t some intrusive pair of glasses that mediates your entire field of vision? What if it’s simply audio?

It makes sense. What is the radio in your car if not a way to augment your reality while driving? A kid on the streetcar puts on his headphones and disappears. We take the power of audio to augment our realities for granted.

Now we can take what we’ve been doing with audio and pair it with location awareness. Technological evolution often happens when you pair things and get something greater than the sum of those parts.

For example: One of Detour’s audio tours is narrated by a fictional character (Ulrich Fürst, a severe German philosopher with a sweet tooth).

Imagine what could be done with location-aware audio and fiction. It could be a whole new way for the reader to get into the mind of the writer—walking around in the world of the story.